Passionate about molecular biology and the endless possibilities that it opens.

Organizer of Ottawa Bio Science community bio group Leader of Open Hardware projects at http://specyal.com/diybio/

And there we go …

Somehow I discovered all my 2023 HTGAA activity disappeared from Notion. Nothing in the trash bin. Too bad, that was a lot of hard work. Fortunately I still have some bits and pieces saved locally.

The Opentron challenge was to create a program that would be able to create molecule node depictions on Petri dishes.

For instance for Ribose we would need to do this:

I managed to recover the Opentron plate image that depicts the node in ribose.

The size of the nodes are made to show the size of the atom. The Pyton project accepts an array of coordinates and sizes for the nodes and directs the robot to pipette the reagent (cells in this case) in the given coordinates. The code is available so any other molecules can be depicted.

E-coli culture on Agar plate. Dots are the atoms in the molecule. The size is relatively proportional with the real life atom size.

The setup and Opentron that produced this culture.

The setup and Opentron that produced this culture.

Fortunately I kept a manual copy of the Final Project that incorporates a lot of information acquired or enhanced during the course. The ethics, parts of the hunt for silica binding tag, list of devices and costs are missing from my backup but it’s still a quite complete project that exemplifies the power of genetic engineering to solve problems.